nhgri « Genomes Unzipped

Yes, it’s Friday Links time yet again here at Genomes Unzipped.

A paper in Nature Genetics this week reports the results of a large meta-analysis of GWAS studies into ulcerative colitis, which more than doubles the number of loci known for the disease from 18 to 47. This pushes the proportion of heritability explained from 11 to 16%, and sheds more light on the shared and non-shared pathways between ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, along with the interplay with other immune and inflammatory disorders.

The lead author is a Genomes Unzipped contributor, but he emphatically refused to contribute to this Friday Links post, on the grounds that he doesn’t want to blow his own trumpet. So, instead, here is a quote from the Sanger Institute’s press release:

“The genomic regions we have identified give us an insight into the biology underlying ulcerative colitis,” says Dr Carl Anderson, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and first author on the paper. “These important initial discoveries are the building blocks on which we can begin to derive better IBD treatments, though much further work is needed before these become a clinical reality.” [LJ]

Nature has a special issue this week devoted to the decade of progress since the publication of the human genome sequence. Eric Lander, who was first author on the original Human Genome Project paper, has a long and thoughtful commentary on the subsequent impact of that publication across a wide range of fields. Elaine Mardis accompanies Lander’s piece with a discussion of the astonishing advances in sequencing technology over the last decade (including a figure that emphasises the tremendous impact of the development of the Solexa/Illumina Genome Analyzer platform, which boosted sequencing capacity by eight orders of magnitude in a single year!).